COMAD 2005
INVITED INDUSTRY SESSION

 

 

Talk 1
 
 TESLA: On-demand Information Systems
  V S Batra (IBM India)

ABSTRACT:

The Tesla project aims to build or enhance middleware to give application programs flexible and predictable access to a large numbers of  autonomous and heterogeneous data  sources and compute resources. We seek to provide flexibility for data access through a novel query formulation and query processing scheme that gives the abstraction of a highly available and performant virtual data store over logical data domains. This abstraction masks from application programs events such as addition or removal of data sources, substitution of replicas for performance and availability, and source unavailability, by converting them into degradations (or improvements) in the information quality. We also aim to provide predictable quality of service for access to this virtual data store, without relying on the dedicated resources. Instead, Tesla uses a variety of resource managers to dynamically provision compute resources as needed, to meet the quality of service needs of the application workload.

 

SPEAKER BIO:
Vishal Batra is a 1997 graduate from IIT Kharagpur. He joined IBM Research in 2001 and has worked on different domains such as Life Sciences, Unstructured Information Management and Grid Computing. Prior to joining IBM, he has worked on various consulting projects and delivered eCommerce applications to clients such as Barclays Bank,
UK and eMedSoft, US. His interests include distributed and high performance computing infrastructure.



Talk 2
 
 Emerging Trends in OLAP
  Vaishnavi Sashikanth (
HyperionSolutions, USA)

ABSTRACT:
It’s more than a decade since Arbor Software pioneered the field of OLAP with a product called Essbase that brought  multidimensional access to spreadsheet users. The definition of  a sound multidimensional data model, effective dimensional-cube persistence mechanisms, aggregations, ad-hoc analyses involving pivoting, rollups, drill downs, an expressive declarative language in which to express multidimensional analysis are just a handful of problems that still continues to intrigue academic researchers,  relational and OLAP database vendors.  However, the focus thus far has predominantly been to efficiently support multidimensional reporting.  In this talk we will present the emerging needs of analytical applications, new data modeling requirements, the role of unstructured data and the notion of closed-loop analysis and the technological requirements it entails.  We will close by highlighting briefly some of the challenges we have tackled in the context of Essbase.
 

 

 

SPEAKER BIO:
Vaishnavi (Anjur) Sashikanth is the Vice President and Architect for the Essbase suite of products at Hyperion Solutions. During her tenure with Hyperion over the last 6 years, Vaishnavi rearchitected core components of the server optimizing the engine to work with any of a relational, multi-dimensional or hybrid physical representation of an OLAP cube. Under her leadership, Essbase server evolved to support two different cube storage and aggregation mechanisms each optimized for different data distribution patterns, transparently, within one engine - setting a new architectural standard for Multidimensional OLAP engines. Prior to Hyperion, Vaishnavi worked at Sybase on revamping the storage access and transaction management components of Sybase Adaptive database server Vaishnavi holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her Bachelors degree, also in Computer Science from College of Engineering, Guindy in India.

 

Talk 3
 
 Mobile Data Analysis and Reporting
  Prasad Ram (Yahoo India)



ABSTRACT:
Corporations are increasingly offering newer services on a global scale that are consumed on handheld devices (such as PDAs, cell phones) by Mobile users. There is a strong need to track transactions on Mobile devices, and provide reports or views into this information to internal   and external business groups spread across geographies for purposes of billing, customer care, sales, marketing, finance and product engineering. Collecting, tracking and analyzing Mobile data on a global scale is a big challenge due to the heterogeneous nature of data, transactions, business-models, and partner-relationships; and timeliness of information in different contexts. For instance, a single transaction could span several regions/countries, different content and service providers, and be charged differently depending on provider relationships and billing models. In addition, the timeliness of the information about this transaction could he higher in the context of customer care as compared to marketing/sales. Further, the range of services/content and volume of transactions are significantly high, as are the demands on the availability, accuracy and timeliness of information (i.e., analyzed data).

 

MARS is a highly scalable Mobile Data Analysis and Reporting System developed at Yahoo that offers a global platform for mobile transaction data collection, analysis, tracking and reporting to global business units and partners. It collects and synchronizes all transaction data across diverse international data sources, organizes data in global data mart, and offers different views and reports to various groups. MARS provides a uniform (and extensible) data model that normalizes data across sources and mechanisms for efficiently mapping multiple data formats. It also offers hierarchical (and extensible) namespaces for data organization, end-to-end tracking of transactions and multi-level reporting. It addresses varying needs on the timeliness of information batch to near real-time in different contexts and ensures controlled access to data by multiple groups/individuals.


 

SPEAKER BIO:
Dr. Prasad Ram is the Chief Technology Officer of Yahoo, India R&D. Previously he was the CTO at Dynamx Technology Inc. where he led the creation of dynamic web services composition technology and built and deployed enterprise information integration products with large media companies. Prior to that, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC where he led the invention of several patented and patent pending distributed systems and securities technologies. Based on these innovations, he was the founding General Manager of Xerox ContentGuard a digital rights management company. It was then spun out as Content Guard, Inc., a joint venture between Microsoft, TimeWarner, and Xerox. Preceding his years at Xerox research and business, he was the Chief Scientist for Enterprise Software Corporation, leading the development of stochastic optimization techniques for job scheduling software. Prasad started his career as a Research Scientist at Rand Corporation -- a think tank for the US government.